Jan 08.

‘I just want to be normal’, wails Little Daughter, hanging onto me as I grip the jerking 

wheel of the Espace, ‘its too difficult Mummy, I want to be able to talk to my friends. 

Why are we here?’

We’re driving through windswept Languedoc vineyards under a harsh grey sky on the

way to school. When you read about families taking the plunge and moving to 

France, you tend not to hear about the endless cold, the uncomfortable, unrenovated

and unheated houses, how the children miss talking to their mates in a language they

actually understand, and how learning French does not, in fact, happen overnight, or

even in a few months. 

Winter in the South of France has taken us all by surprise, and small daughters not the only one

who’s fed up. BF has taken to silently wandering around with a

sledgehammer, hammering down walls in what will be our upstairs, and Teenage

Daughter locks herself in her room whenever she’s not at school, emerging

occasionally to eat, or to shout at someone (no change there then). And bedtime is

early. Very early. Teenage daughters school starts at 8, so we’re all up when it’s still dark, and

after a day fixing up the gite in the howling winds we’re ready for bed by nine. Apart

from fatigue, bed is the warmest place. Our house is very cold - the 1970s tiles that

line its floors are built for the super hot summers, and there is no proper heating, no

fire, no burner. The French must be a hardy lot is all I can think when I step shivering

into our freezing unheated bathroom each morning.  

December probably wasn’t the best time to move to this pretty medieval village billed

as the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the Canal du Midi. Before we bought it, our house had

been in the same family for the last one hundred years, and decorated to look like a

tacky nightclub in the last twenty. We have a big project ahead of us and a lot of

adjusting to do. A big house, a small house, a big scruffy garden, and a courtyard

overlooking the canal. It’s a dream lifestyle change and a fantastic renovation

opportunity, or to use BFs phrase, it’s a derelict - actually two derelicts.

 

The small house will become a gite and the plan is to do that up first so we can rent it,

to get some cash. This means living in the big house as it is, complete with no heating,

not enough bedrooms, green velvet walls, carpet on the ceiling. Picture a beautiful

classic French house with all it’s original features and then picture a nineteen eighties

conversion with all the features ripped out, and that’s us. We’re the house they crop

out in the thousands of photos, which are taken here every year. On top of that BF

and I sleep in the front room, as for reasons I can’t quite remember we didn’t factor in

the current lack of bedrooms when we bought it, and we gave Teenage Daughter the best and

biggest, because she is the teenager, instead of insisting the kids share. Yes, you can

question the logic. So Little Daughter also has her own room, but at least we get the

telly, and the view.

All our stuff is still in England, along with all our cash, which is actually not cash at

all, but bricks and mortar in the flat we didn’t sell before we left, which was a minute

or two before the biggest property crash in the last twenty years. We moved for

warmth, and an easier style of living, a way to be closer as a family, especially for me,

because I was a busy television producer, giving an exhausting hundred and ten 

percent in all the wrong directions, and I never got to see my kids. I was so exhausted

that  when me and kids went camping, I ended up in hospital with severe pneumonia. 

So I decided to call my hectic-have-it-all-life a day. I stopped buying, stopped

working and looked for something new, and now here we are in the South of 

France. And it’s bloody hard work; all in a language I can’t yet get to grips with,

despite my years of learning it, and its cold, and the kids hate it.

So right now, although I don’t tell her, I think Little Daughter has a point and I’m not sure why 

we made the move, or what in hells name I’m doing driving an ailing Espace (believe

them when they say that Espaces go wrong a lot) across a pitted vineyard road, living

off loads of borrowed money, and freezing cold.